SLOW BUT SURE
Francis King, Sunday Telegraph, December 2, 1979
IT is both a peculiarity and a glory of any Chekhov play that, according to the production and the performances, this or that character seems to be predominant.
In Pam Gems's translation of Uncle Vanya (Hampstead), directed by Nancy Meckler, it is Ian Holm's Astrov, at once steely of purpose and barren of feeling, who becomes the central pivot. His is a wonderfully subtle and varied portrait of a man whom many commentators have regarded as Chekhov's far from flattering image of himself.
But every member of the cast - from Nigel Hawthorne as ineffectual, disillusioned Vanya, to Susan Littler's languorously captivating Yellena - is impeccable.
This is a slow-paced reading of the work, and one in which the humour of such a remark as Vanya's "My life's ruined... I might have been a Schopenhauer or a Dostoievsky" tends to be muted. But it achieves the essential of making an audience feel both the poignancy and the absurdity of its characters' un-fulfilled ideals and frustrated loves.
Sonya, of course, is only one of a whole series of women in Chekhovs plays whose yearnings for the unattainable ensure their unhappiness. That one feels no irritation with her for mooning after Astrov for six long years instead of settling for some kind of humdrum accommodation with a man more responsive, is in large measure due to a perfect performance from Alison Steadman. I have never been more moved by the final scene in which she and Vanya once more settle down to their daily drudgery, their visitors gone, and she then breaks off to assure him that, after they have lived through all the boredom and misery that lie ahead of them, ''We shall find Peace."
This outstanding production demands to be transferred to a theatre where it can be seen by a larger audience.
Uncle Vanya
James Fenton, Sunday Times, December 2, 1979
THREE bravura performances: Nigel Hawthorne, blinded with tears, inveighing against the wastage of his life - he could have been a Schopenhauer, a Dostoevsky... and then, with dismal clarity, "Oh, I'm talking rubbish!"; Alison Steadman, prophesying that after the bitterness of a life devoted to others, they shall find peace - her fists clenched, the words spat out, rather than delivered in the "tired voice" mentioned in the script; and Ian Holm, in the first moment of the play, caught by the spotlight in the act of abandoning a train of thought, a man apparently vague and genial, yet not without danger or passionate inner strength. Uncle Vanya, Sonya and Astrov respectively - enough to make the Hampstead Theatre's new Chekhov production really worth seeing.
Yet the production itself must be severely faulted, for all the strength of these performances. And the fault lies in Nancy Meckler's reading of the play. Why is it, for instance, that, when Astrov suddenly accuses Yeliena of playing him along, one feels so strongly that he must be under a misapprehension? There has been nothing in Susan Littler's interpretation to justify any accusation of disingenuousness on her part. And why is it that after Uncle Vanya has thrown himself at Yeliena's feet (a direction not given by Chekhov, who recommends that he kiss her hand) and she has left the room, Vanya gets up again with such cynical speed? Has be merely been amusing himself at the young girl's expense? Or has the actor mistimed it? The fact that one cannot be certain must surely count as a fault.
Both of these moments involve Yeliena, the beautiful young wife of the ageing and selfish professor of arts (played by Maurice Denham). Susan Littler uses an oddly flat voice and remains too consistently distracted for us to feel that she is really a part of the production. Indeed she conveys a strong impression of one seeking a clue to her own character that will help her to enter the same world as the other players.
In other words, the way those three bravura performances work leave no room for another major character. There are further faults: one misses the atmospheric pauses, the suggestion of sultriness. Comic lines fail to get laughs, while poignant moments are greeted with some hilarity. The first night audience responded to Sonya's remarks on her plainness with a noise that seemed to say: come off it, dear. But I admired and was moved by Nigel Hawthorne's Vanya. His weeping was manly. There was no self-indulgence.
The "version" of the text was by Pam Gems. It is not strikingly more conversational than Ronald Hingley's translation; indeed it is sometimes less so. In an afterword to the play, Pam Gems tells us. that she is not interested in the play as literature, "whatever that word means." On the other hand, she does think of it as a classic, whatever that word means.
"Uncle Vanya"
John Barber, Daily Telegraph, April 30, 1979
The Theatre at Hampstead has won a reputation for mounting new plays by contemporary authors.
Although the current production is a revival of a classic. Anton Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," it is given in a new translation by Pam Gems, whose original work has also been seen on this stage.
She teams once again with a director, Nancy Meckler. who shares her awareness of the nuances of feeling and the odd comicality of seeing others in distress.
Since these are qualities they share with Chekhov, their production is excellent. Its small, precise effects suit the small theatre and the women's roles are, as might be expected, particularly well realised.
I was not altogether persuaded by Nigel Hawthorne as Vanya. He communicates the hopeless anger of the hard working manager of the estate, threatened with dispossession by the infuriatingly selfish professor (Maurice Denham) whose wife Vanya also covets.
Mr Hawthorne gives us the tragi-comedy of Vanya's rage when he tries twice to shoot the professor - and misses both times. What was lacking was the burnt-out weariness at the heart of the man. Nor did the idealism in the forest-loving Astrov flicker convincingly back to life in Ian Holm's stolid performance.
But ah, the women! Alison Steadman, as the pathetic drudge who dotes on Astrov, plays with extraordinary truth. The interpretation is remarkably physical.
Equally impressive is Susan Littler as the beautiful Yellena, who attracts both men with her provocative stillness, she even suggests the sexuality that stirs, and then dies back into placidity.
The translation sees to it that everything spoken works on the audience by implication and not explication. The social milieu is perhaps somewhat lowered, and there is no hint that the period is 1897, but the idiom is always fresh and natural. Highly commended.
Uncle Vanya (Hampstead)
J. C. Trewin
Holiday Shows in London
CHEKHOV is seldom staged so intimately as he is now in the Hampstead Theatre's Uncle Vanya, a picture of frustrated hopes in the deep south of Russia at the ebb of the nineteenth century. At Hampstead we are practically within that country house of quarrels and heartbreak; life there goes steadily awry, though when Astrov, the doctor, returns in a few months, he is likely to find things much the same in Vanya's room, the pens still scratching, the crickets chirping, and that irrelevant map of India on the wall.
True, the place will be without the dreary old Professor and his young wife, and that will be all to the good. When they are around, the feelings inside the house can match the electric storm without. Its incidental comedy aside, this is always a touching and wistful play; its last moments - as in the other major work of Chekhov - are memorably moving.
Certainly it is appropriate to have the revival at Hampstead now, just twenty years after James Roose-Evans opened the theatre with his production of The Seagull. Vanya is so uniformly well cast that it seems wrong not to name everyone; but here I must confine myself to three people: Alison Steadman, whose Sonya, never for a moment prettified, is at the heart of Chekhov's creation; Nigel Hawthorne, whose Vanya - life over, as he thinks, for a man of forty-seven - is at once lovable and pathetic; and Ian Holm, whose Astrov, man of the trees and doctor in permanent rural exile, seems to me to be as telling as any since Olivier's. The pace is judged precisely in Nancy Meckler's direction; and the new version, both colloquial and theatrical, is by Pam Gems.
Russian Gems
SHERIDAN MORLEY
HAMPSTEAD Theatre's current and superlative Uncle Vanya is carefully billed as being in "a version" by Pam Gems; not a translation, you understand, nor strictly an adaptation, simply an arrangement of a masterpiece, one which manages ever so slightly to sharpen and highlight our knowledge of the play without ever being untrue to its original mood or intent. Given a cast the NT or the RSC would have been proud (and must now be envious) of, this new production by Nancy Meckler is very much an actors' evening. With Ian Holm as the doctor Astrov, Nigel Hawthorne as Vanya, Alison Steadman as Sonya, Maurice Denham as the Professor and Jean Anderson as his old mother, we are well taken care of: indeed with the exception of the Olivier-Redgrave-Plowright production which launched Chichester in the early 1960s it is hard to believe there can anywhere have been a better postwar Vanya.
To their infinite credit, Miss Gems and Miss Meckler (whose previous collaboration was the long-running Dusa, Fish, Stas & Vi) have not tried to make this "their" Vanya: no feminist overtones, no nudging pointers to the death of civilisation, no hint of the aristocracy in decay. Instead a curt, brisk, tragi-comic rendering of half a dozen unforgettable characters crashing into each other like pinballs.
"It's a nice day," says Yelena (Susan Littler), "not too hot." "Just right for hanging yourself," replies Vanya, and, later, it is Yelena who points out that "A talented man can't stay undamaged in Russia." The point of Vanya, said Chekhov, was to show that, "in life people are not every minute shooting each other, hanging themselves or making declarations of love.., for the most part they eat, drink, bang about and talk nonsense: and this must be seen on the stage."
So here it all is, and what makes it so infinitely impressive is the feeling that this company has been together, reacting to each other's reflexes, for a matter of months rather than weeks; they will, if there is any justice, be staying together for a matter of years.
